i 4 THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



that the profits on the millions upon millions of little pelts — 

 hundreds of thousands of muskrats are taken out of this muskeg 

 alone — exceed by a hundredfold the profits on the larger furs 

 of beaver and silver fox and bear and wolf and cross fox and marten. 



Look at the map again ! North of Cumberland Lake to the next 

 fur post is a trifling run of 250 to 300 miles by dog train to Lac 

 du Brochet or Reindeer Lake — more muskeg cut by limestone and 

 granite ridges. Here you can measure 400 miles east or west and 

 not get out of the muskeg till you reach Athabasca on the West 

 and Hudson Bay on the East. North of Lac du Brochet is a straight 

 stretch of 1000 miles — nothing but rocks and cataracts and stunted 

 woods, "little sticks" the Indians call them — and sky-colored 

 waters in links and chains and lakes with the quaking goose grass 

 and muskrat reed cut and chiselled and trenched by the amber 

 water ways. 



If you think there is any danger of settlement ever encroaching 

 on the muskegs and barrens, come with me on a trip of some weeks 

 to the south end of this field. 



We had been pulling against slack water all day, water so slack 

 you could dip your hand down and fail to tell which way the current 

 ran. Where the high banks dropped suddenly to such a dank 

 tangle of reeds, brushwood, windfall and timbers drifted 1500 miles 

 down from the forests of the Rocky Mountains — such a tangle as 

 I have never seen in any swamp of the South — the skeleton of a 

 moose, come to its death by a jump among the windfall, marked the 

 eastern limit of big game ; and presently the river was lost — not 

 in a lake — but in a swamp. A red fox came scurrying through the 

 goose grass, sniffed the air, looked at us and ran along abreast of 

 our canoe for about a mile, evidently scenting the bacon of the 

 "grub box." Muskrats fed on the bulb of the tufted "reed like 

 a tree" 16 feet high on each side; and again and again little kits 

 came out and swam in the ripple of our canoe. Once an old duck 

 performed the acrobatic feat over which nature and anti-nature 

 writers have been giving each other the lie. We had come out of 



